'The Color Purple': magnificent songs, great visual disappointment

Can a musical not be a good musical film despite the excellence of its music?

Definitely.

The Color Purple,

in the film version of Blitz Bazawule, is the latest example.

There is a fantastic collection of songs, with music and lyrics by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray, which, covering a long story that occupies the first half of the 20th century, advances chronologically and musically through some of the most emblematic styles associated with black music and the deep South:

blues,

soul

,

gospel,

jazz.

There is also a notable group of performers, some of them—starting with Fantasia Barrino, its protagonist—already toiled on the Broadway stage in its theatrical version, 11 Tony Award nominations in 2006 and revitalized in a 2015 revival. And, of course, there is the dramatic and somewhat tear-jerking story of its main character, “poor, black, ugly and woman”, separated from her beloved sister for decades, massacred by the execution hammer of the men around her, and saved by solidarity of Women, a new adaptation of the famous novel by Alice Walker with which Steven Spielberg made his first approach to drama in 1985.

Fantasia Barrino, in 'The Color Purple'

However, the visualization of the whole, uneven, without identity, with some notable number and with some other pedestrian number, does not reach the level.

Bazawule, behind the camera, whose most relevant credit until now was having directed

Black Is King

(2020), Beyoncé's visual album inspired by

The Lion King,

“conceived to celebrate the halo and beauty of ancestral blackness,” in the words of the singer herself, seems more committed to trying to imitate Spielberg in the sentimental and to be the umpteenth emulator of Terrence Malick and his shining sun crossing the silhouettes of his characters, than to conceive a true conjunction between drama, music, dance and the graphic composition of pictorial inspiration of the different elements in the shot - both the characters and the physical environment -, aided at the same time by the use of light and the colors of the costumes, which is what ends up forming a good (or a great) musical.

Although he may lack a point of charisma as a film performer, the one that the (almost) newcomer Whoopi Goldberg did possess in Spielberg's adaptation of Walker's novel, Barrino, who came from

American Idol

before succeeding on Broadway, has a Huge voice and delivers in spades.

Both Danielle Brooks, nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actress, as well as Colman Domingo and the spectacular Taraji P. Henson are great in their roles.

Now, we've already said it, the problem with

The Color Purple

is visual.

Although there are good numbers, always enhanced by the score and saved by its performers, there is rarely a dynamic sense of space, harmony and expressive unity in the film.

More information

Read all the movie reviews here

Cinema, no matter how musical it is, is image.

And there are moments in which the image comes to hurt, with two paradigmatic moments in the sinkhole: the sequence set in Africa, with a festival of clichés in setting and costumes, horrendous lighting and a deplorable staging, with the camera always in the least suitable place;

and the final number, with the final bad taste in the mouth, of an overwhelming statism - and more so, in the case of a musical -, with the characters singing behind some inconsequential tables, and full of ugly mid-shots cut across the stomach.

That is, the antithesis of what should be a climactic moment of the genre.

The color purple

Direction:

Blitz Blazawule.

Starring:

Fantasia Barrino, Colman Domingo, Taraji P. Henson, Danielle Brooks. 

Musical genre

.

USA, 2023.

Duration:

140 minutes.

Premiere: February 9.

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I am already a subscriber

_